Mine - Becky Cherriman

“Mine,” says my two-year-old niece, plucking the green beanie off my head. “Mine,” she repeats as she slips it over hers, proving it to be hugely - hilariously - too big. “Mine,” she says again, informing me as to the true ownership of her giant inflatable rabbit. “Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine!” We adults smile knowingly at each other, “bless!” But if only we knew how many times we’d chanted the same thing. Hundreds of thousands? A million? And that’s only one generation. How many more back to the mi of Old Saxon, the mik of Old Norse or even the mam of Sanskrit?* And at what point do we convince others that the packet of Cadbury’s Chocolate Fingers really are mine, that the border of a country or a county is?

“Mine,” starts up the audience in a mesmeric hum. “Mine,” chants this huddled semi-circle in Nottingham who’ve come only to listen. But Becky Cherriman’s poem wants more from us than silent acknowledgement. It’s choral and quarrelsome, a poem unfashionably out of form (almost all the others we will hear will be written in one traditional form or another), a poem that insists we hear our own internal contradictions: that belonging to a place, coming from a place can never be a simple story, is always instead an inured ambivalence; I want to get away but stay put too. 

That contradiction is in the poem. At 44 lines and roughly 02:15 in performance (not including applause!), occassionally, opportunistically rhymed (l.1-A, l.3-A/, l.7-A, l.9-A-int/; l.30-B, l.31-B; l.44-C-int) relying heavily on a small repertoire of rhetorical techniques, (repetition, paromoiosis, brachylogia) the  poem shuttles between expansive romantic sentiment and direct no-nonsense statement; between waxing lyrical and shutting your trap (very Leeds). 

Take l.17 - l.22, within these five lines we’re circumscribed within what is thoroughly stratified diction, ‘the aria of the tide,’ ‘the opening of the lotus,’ ‘the weave and the weft,’ lucid dreams and yawning caves, we're stifling a yawn too, we've heard it all before. And yet the forward impetus of the repetition (‘Mine is …’) coupled with the sound parallelism (l.18 and l.20) incredibly makes, what would otherwise be pretty dull-dead stuff, come to life. Part of this is its mindfulness of performance; the poem wants to be read aloud.

And why not? It was born for it. Mythic but unpatronizing; allusive but down-to-earth, the poem keeps faith with the primary visceral texture of language. More neat parallelism being built into l.30 − 33, l.43 − 45 comes out in performance as so much savoured language, an appeal which rarely fails to do just that. 

Mahmoud Darwish

Though the poem insists on the right to political statement (being written after controversial Palestine poet Mahmoud Darwish), that the geopolitical divisions that exist the world over necessarily exist here too, its negotiation with performance and its eye and ear for how it will be received demonstrate a sincere wish for, as l.45 has it ‘new beginnings.’ One could do much worse than to make this their mantra.


*If we put one generation at a very approximate 25 years and trust Wikipedia about when Sanskrit first came to India and Pakistan, (in the second millenium BCE), then the sum is fairly straightforward. 4013/25 = 160.52 generations. Ask how many 'mines' or mine-like-utterances were repeated during those generations, multiply and - well - no wonder the word appeals. 

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The event took place thanks to the Beeston Poets based in Beetson Library, Nottingham. Check out their up-coming events here. You can find Becky Cherriman at her website, and read her poems. You can listen to the live performance of 'Mine' at Beeston Poets too.

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Mine 

(after Mahmoud Darwish’s I Come From There)

1     I walked this land before

2     the moon was torn from the earth

3     in a gnashing of rock and magma.

4     I come from bones stripped bare

5     on an empty plain.

6     Born in a roar of lion cubs,

7     I had the mane of Sif and a legacy to fight for.

8     Mine is the forest and the herb

9     and the terra strata of vineyards.

10    Mine is the hills and the streams,

11    womb song and fire dance.

12    The golden apple is mine
13    and the bubbling stove.
14    Mine is the mangle and mine is the cradle.

15    Mine is the inheritance 

16    snatched by wolves.

17    The aria of the tide is mine.

18    and the opening of the lotus

19    Mine is the weave and the weft 

20    and the welcome interruption 

21    Mine is the lucid dream,

22    the history hidden in the yawning cave.

23    Mine is the holding place.

24    Mine is the inheritance 

25    snatched by wolves.

26    Mine is whalebone 

27    and plucked out toenails.

28    Mine is the stone and the razor, 

29    the red light and the wimple.

30    Mine is size zero and cellulite.

31    Mine is the soldiers in the night.

32    Mine is the girdle and the branding iron.

33    Mine is the language that clamps my tongue.

34    Mine is the inheritance 

35    snatched by wolves.

36    I have sent them away 

37    with torn ears and limping.

38    I learnt their stories only to rewrite them. 

39    I render the poison to the adder, 

40    the gold to Midas.

41    Mine is the ship on the horizon

42    where I net double rainbows like mussels. 

43    Make no mistake, 

44    I would raise the seas and drown the cities 

45    to forge a new beginning.



(Poem reproduced with permission of the author.)